The influence of Instagram’s affordances on Instapoetry: the characteristics of a literary genre born on social media
Instagram is one of the biggest social media platforms in the world. With billions of monthly users, it offers people from all over the world the possibility to connect. One of the creative expressions existing on Instagram is Instapoetry, an Instagram-born poetry genre. Even though Instapoetry can express itself in many different ways, it is inherently shared on the platform as an image — often in Instagram's most common square format —, with a typed text accompanying it.
Instapoetry is published on the platform with pre-determined characteristics that shape everything users upload. Aspects such as these could determine the way Instapoetry is shaped. Hence, it is plausible that the platform’s characteristics influence the materiality of the poetry that is shared on it, which will consequently affect every dimension of its existence: from the way it is created to the way it appears, is shared and perceived.
Affordances
The materiality of a social media platform is mostly visible when focusing on affordances, which is “a key term for understanding and analyzing social media interfaces and the relations between technology and its users” (Bucher and Helmond, 2018, p. 3). Affordances decide what can be done on Instagram, and what cannot. As such, affordances affect how we see the platform. Instagram's like button, its square format, and its focus on images — which is gradually changing to a focus on “reels”—are all visual aspects of the affordances that influence the materiality of Instapoetry.
This study will focus on Instapoetry’s materiality in the digital world. It is assumed that the affordances and design features of Instagram shape the poetry published on it. Often when Instapoetry is studied, it is a literary study that results in critiquing the poetry's simplicity. There are also studies that focus on the poetry's literary qualities, or on the opportunities this new poetic genre can offer for educational purposes (Pâquet, 2019, p. 301; Dera and Van der Starre, 2019). Because this article aims to focus on the affordances of the platform in the context of the poetry published on it, this article will emphasize the infrastructure of Instagram and its poetry, rather than performing an in-depth analysis of the content of its poetic posts.
Digital ethnography
Ten poet-users (this term is used instead of the common term ‘Instapoet’ because of its negative connotation) will be analyzed using digital ethnography as an approach. Digital ethnography can be described as a research approach where one becomes part of an online community by observing and – if possible – participating in online interaction. In this way, a deep understanding of the studied subject can be realized. In the chapter “Digital Ethnography” in The Routledge Handbook of Language and Digital Communication, Varis explains the history of digital ethnography and the various aspects that come into play when performing an online study using digital ethnographic methods (2015). She also states that ethnography has to be understood as "a learning process where research is guided by experience gathered in the field” (2015, p. 56). Because of the multiplicity of the research approach and the process that it accompanies, it is necessary to have a predetermined framework to hold on to. Because digital ethnography is a flexible approach, it is adaptable to the context, and therefore useful to study the influence of Instagram on Instapoetry.
Selecting poet-users
For this study, Google's search engine was considered the most convenient tool for selecting poet-users, as Instagram itself does not offer sufficient tools to search people without knowing their usernames. The decision to use this selection technique was inspired by Lucas van der Deijl et al.’s study called The canon of Dutch literature according to Google, where the researchers used Google search to find out “what the canon of Dutch literature would look like if it were up to Google” (Van der Deijl et al., 2019, p. 2; p. 5). They argue that many people seem to find their literary knowledge on the web, making “search engines such as Google [...] brokers in this online economy of knowledge, organizing information on the web for its users,” transforming Google into a new literary institution which should be taken into account (2019, p. 1).
The ten studied poet-users were selected by comparing the first ten web results when typing the prompt “Top 10 Instapoetry accounts to follow” in Google. The incognito mode was used to bypass personalized results as much as possible. The 'top 10' lists were recorded, resulting in a file with 57 different Instapoetry accounts. Four accounts with general poetry were deleted from the file since this study focuses on poet-users and their poetry. Then, to select ten out of the remaining 53 poets, it was calculated which poets appeared most often on the ten websites. Because this study focuses on the influence of Instagram’s affordances on Instapoetry, this study will only look at the last ten posts (on May 24th, 2023) with poetry, not with other pictures or drawings.
Top 10 Instapoetry accounts according to the ten studied websites
Top 10 Instapoetry accounts according to the ten studied websites
Results
Account names
All ten poet-users' accounts have usernames that are relatively easy to find. They almost all resemble their first and last name written together. Only Robert M. Drake decided to go for a slightly more encrypted name by leaving out the vowels of his name (@rmdrk). Though for those who know, his name is still recognizable. Furthermore, Atticus has long been an anonymous poet. His real name is Duncan Penn, but he got famous under his acronym. Because most account names correspond to the poet-users’ legal names, it appears they have become famous using their names, and not by including something with “writer”, “poetry”, or “literature” in their account names. Because of this, it would be a difficult task to find the accounts without the support of a search engine such as Google, or any prior knowledge of the writers’ existence beforehand.
Biographies
Overall, the user-poets have comparable biographies. Six out of ten poets have included information about their publications in their biographies and seem to use Instagram as a way to advertise their work. For example, Rupi Kaur’s biography reads: “My 4th book ‘Healing Through Words’ is here!”, followed by a link to her website. Atticus states: “My new book ‘LVOE’ available now:” followed by a link to his publisher’s website. Lang Leav does the same: “New novel OTHERS WERE EMERALDS out September 2023. Link to pre-order”, with a link to the pre-order attached under the text. Instagram only offers the possibility to include links in the user’s biographies. This is probably the reason all ten poet-users have included a link in their biographies. Most of the poets have a link that brings the user to their personal website. However, Nikita Gill, Amanda Gorman, and Lang Leav have a link that directs the user to their publisher’s website immediately, clearly pointing to the advertisement of their books and poetry bundles.
Instagram biographies of the profiles of the ten poet-users.
Brian Bilston is one of the two poets who seems to not directly advertise his books in his biography. He has a link on his biography leading to his website. However, instead of going to the section with his books, the users are sent to the section with his upcoming events and shows. Amanda Gorman is another poet who does not advertise her books in her biography but takes a more activist position by stating: “Take a stand against book bans below”, with a link to allow people to support the battle against book bans in the USA on the Pen.org website. One of the reasons for including this link in her biography could be because Gorman’s inaugural poem The Hill We Climb was banned from some school libraries in Florida high schools (Holpuch, 2023).
The writing style of the biographies is diverging between the poets. Rupi Kaur, Atticus, Nikita Gill, Lang Leav, and Robert M. Drake talk about their profession and accomplishments as a writer, with quotes such as: “My special ‘Rupi Kaur live’ is streaming on Amazon Prime”, “3x NYT Bestselling Author”, “International Bestselling Author”, and “New York Times Best Selling Author”. The other five writers include something more personal or simple, like: “Autistic. Poet. Photographer. Buddhist. Husband of @ladygregson”, “I write poems.”, and “I tell stories. Some tall, some dark.”.
Hence, the biographies of poet-users range between being used for advertising, to display one’s achievements in a one or two sentenced Curriculum Vita, or to communicate more personal and simple messages. Hence, even though, in contrast to the traditional literary field, a poet-user doesn't need to be a published poet to gain a large audience, all of them are. Also, all selected poet-users are native English speakers. Even though the poets have various backgrounds when it comes to heritage or wealth, they all have been born or raised in English-speaking countries: the United States (Tyler Knott Gregson, Robert M. Drake, Brian Bilston, Morgan Harper Nichols, Amanda Gorman), the United Kingdom (Nikita Gill, Yrsa Daley-Ward), Canada (Atticus, Rupi Kaur), and New-Zealand (Lang Leav).
This displays that even though Instagram offers people from all around the world possibilities to become a well-known poet-user, social media seems to have its own structure of prestige, in which English speakers have an advantage over others.
Graphics
As is visible in the data, the ten poet-users have different ways of portraying their poetry. Four poet-users keep it simple. They only display the poem’s text in the image.
Brian Bilston is one of these poets. He seems to generally use the same style, with his poem’s title written in bold text on top of the poem, the poem itself outlined to the left most of the time, and his name written in cursive underneath the poem. The only poem where he centred the text is a concrete poem (meaning the poem is in the shape of the object described) called “Tory Party Dinner Menu”. It resembles a dinner menu. The caption written underneath Bilston’s poems is a repetition of the title, or sometimes a description that provides information about the creation of the poem, such as: “On the way up to Scotland and trying to write a poem about the view from my train”. Robert M. Drake’s poetry style seems to resemble Bilston’s in many ways. They both use black text, outline most of the poems to the left, and end the poems with their names. However, in contrast to Bilston, Drake seems to be a little less coherent in style, with different font sizes in some posts and background colours in various shades of (almost) white. In all ten posts, the posts’ captions are about the sale of Drake’s poetry bundle.
The ten studied Instapoetry posts of Brian Bilston
The ten studied Instapoetry posts of Robert M. Drake
Lang Leav also shares only texts as posts but does it in a different way than Brian Bilston and Robert M. Drake. The portrayal of Leav's texts is more varied. Sometimes it is an uploaded digital text, similar to Bilston's and Drake's texts. Leav, however, also shares pictures from poems taken out of her books as Instapoetry. This can be viewed as an advertisement of her books as well, especially with captions such as: “From my book” or “From my new poetry book”.
The ten studied Instapoetry posts of Lang Leav
Amanda Gorman seems to mostly share screenshots of her Tweets, with only one of the poems being an actual Instagram post. We might wonder whether screenshots from X can serve as Instapoetry or not. However, she is included in three out of the ten lists of poet-users, which means the general opinion seems to be 'yes'. Sharing screenshots from X constitutes a creative way to circumvent Instagram’s affordances of image sharing, and adhering to a different materiality than the other poets. Using a different social media platform which focuses on texts and sharing a screenshot of this posted text on Instagram could be interpreted as a poet-user finding a way around the restricting affordances of Instagram, just like the pictures of Leav’s physical poetry bundles that were mentioned earlier.
The ten studied Instapoetry posts of Amanda Gorman
Other poet-users seem to use Instagram’s affordances of image-sharing as an opportunity to include images in their posts and change their poetry into little artworks. Morgan Harper Nichols is the most notable example of this, with artworks colourfully accompanying and complementing her poetry. Additionally, Rupi Kaur has become known for her little, simple drawings accompanying every piece of poetry. These images are complementary to the poetry and also appear in her poetry bundles, such as Milk and Honey.
Yrsa Daley Ward has a different way of displaying her Instapoetry: with black text in a white square on a picture background. The pictures often have nature-inspired themes, such as trees or flowers, but also contain images that seem to be more random, such as a sink or a shopping cart. Ward uses the slideshow affordance of Instagram to be able to include multiple pictures in one poetry post. In this way, the images visible in the dataset could be regarded as an attention-pulling cover of the other images included in the slideshow.
Colours
Some poets keep it simple, others go all out. Many of the writers go for a (mostly) black-and-white colour theme. This counts for Rupi Kaur, Nikita Gill, Lang Leav, Robert M. Drake, Brian Bilston, and Amanda Gorman. However, interestingly, the profiles do not look the same. Kaur uses the before-mentioned black drawings to complement the theme of every single poem displayed in only black text. Most of the drawings are on the bottom of the image, which resembles her books, whereas the drawings are most often on the bottom of the page as well.
The ten studied Instapoetry posts of Rupi Kaur
Gill uses a black-on-white theme in nine out of ten poems, of which six contain black text in a white text block with a nature-inspired video as a background behind it. These reels allow the poem’s background to move while the poem remains fixed. As mentioned before, Lang Leav mostly uploads pictures or scans taken from one of her poetry-bundles. This makes the white on the background have different shades and on one of the ten posts, there is a bit of background visible. Robert M. Drake uses a black-on-white-ish style, with the background colours ranging between white, very light blue and very light pink shades. His profile resembles the one of Lang Leav in colour use, but Drake only uploads virtual texts, whereas Leav uploads pictures of texts. Just like Drake, Brian Bilston also only posts screenshots of digitally-typed texts. However, in Bilston’s case, all backgrounds have the same white colour.
The ten studied Instapoetry posts of Nikita Gill
Amanda Gorman is the only poet who does not seem to have a true style in her feed. Often, the poems are screenshots of Tweets. However, one post is almost filled with text. Another post is a screenshot of one of Gorman’s poems published in the New York Times, which has a different style than the rest of her poetry.
The before-mentioned Morgan Harper Nichols has the most colourful feed, with little (digitally) painted artworks accompanying every single poem. The works seem to be nature-inspired and often go well with the poem’s text. One out of ten posts does not include a painted background but is coloured pink. Even though the colour range is wide, the overall view of Nichols’ feed displays an assumable, well-thought-out Instagram profile with artworks that look like they could stand on themselves.
The ten studied Instapoetry posts of Morgan Harper Nichols
Besides Nichols, Tyler Knott Gregson, Atticus, and Yrsa Daley-Ward use a more colourful and unique aesthetic. Gregson has two different styles: he either posts scans from poetry written with a typewriter on lined paper, or paper with a yellow or orange undertone, or he posts vlog-style reels under the before-mentioned name ‘Typewriter series’, where he talks about one of his poems. Atticus does not have one particular style in his feed, but the colour scheme does look consciously put together.
The colours are either nature-inspired or black and white, and he often works with text boxes over images or reels. Yrsa Daley-Ward’s style is striking because of the before-mentioned images of a sink and a shopping cart, which appear. to be not directly related to the poem following in the slideshow. However, she has a strict colour scheme, with the images — which are full of colour — being made less bright to perform as backgrounds. The reason for this practice might be that Ward does not work with text boxes. A low brightness means that white typography placed over the image can be enough to ensure readability. In two out of the ten images, Ward only uploads a yellow or white image on her feed with black text on it.
The ten studied Instapoetry posts of Yrsa Daley Ward
Six out of ten poets follow a strict black-and-white colour scheme, and the remaining four go for a more colourful display. It is visible that all poet-users, and especially the ones who use colour, have thought out their colour use. This results in an overall aesthetically pleasing feed, which makes it pleasant to scroll to their profiles.
Typography
When looking at the poems, it becomes apparent that some poets have a preference for certain typographic styles, while others seem to go for a font that fits a certain poem or works with a certain background. Rupi Kaur, Nikita Gill, Lang Leav, Robert M. Drake, and Brian Bilston all use Times New Roman as their font style. Bilston seems to differ in text size depending on the length of the poem. Yrsa Daley-Ward mostly uses Times New Roman but also includes other font styles in her feed. This also counts for Atticus, who uses Times New Roman in six posts but changes font style often.
The ten studied Instapoetry posts of Atticus
Amanda Gorman often varies in her typography style and uses the Times New Roman font only in two out of ten posts. She often uses the Calibri font, or – because she often uploads screenshots from X posts – the Chirp font of X.
Tyler Knott Gregson has his unique style of using a physical typewriter to type on differently coloured paper. Morgan Harper Nichols' style is also unique. Her chosen typography matches the physically or digitally painted art accompanying the poems, is always white or black, and seems to be hand-written. However, in one of the ten images the style is different and Nichols uses Times New Roman font in white.
The ten studied Instapoetry posts of Tyler Knott Gregson
Even though Instagram, as an image-oriented platform, allows the poet-users to write down poetry by hand and upload a picture of this poem, none of the ten poet-users do so. Morgan Harper Nichols does use a font that seems to have a hand-written aesthetic, but the text is still clearly created digitally. Because of this, Instapoetry seems to be establishing a digital and technological focus, which often causes poets to upload typed texts only, often on a colourful or fully white background.
Themes
Because Instagram’s affordances do not offer much space or time to display difficult or long texts, Instapoetry is often short in length. Because of this, the poetry is not hard to understand. However, this can also be because of the “scrolling” culture of the app, where people often do not look at an image or text for long before scrolling on to the next post. By studying the 100 posts of 10 different poet-users that were selected for this research, it has become clear that overall, poet-users seem to write about universal themes in their poetry.
Sometimes poet-users have two themes in one poem. For example, in the poem Acceptance, Rupi Kaur writes about the themes of self-love and identity (Kaur, 2023).
It’s easy to love
The nice things about ourselves
But true self-love is
Embracing the difficult parts
That lives in all of us.
The poet with the most diverging themes seems to be Brian Bilston. Even though his inspiration seems to mostly lie in nature (with the theme mentioned four out of ten times), he also writes about themes such as exams and Star Wars.
Themes of the ten studied Instapoetry accounts
As becomes visible in the table, the three most common themes of Instapoetry are identity (8 poet-users and 17/100 poems), love (8 poet-users and 33/100 poems) and motivational posts (7 poet-users and 28/100 poems). These three themes fit the earlier mentioned characteristics of Instapoetry.
Namely, the themes are universal. Most users who come across one of these poems would probably be able to recognize itself in the text. The texts and themes are not very 'deep' and not hard to understand. This allows the poet-users to offer the reader a poem that can be read and understood in a couple of seconds. The universality of themes, even though these are reflected in contemporary world literature as well, and the simplicity of the writing style seem to be inherent features of Instapoetry. These two features indicate the accessibility of Instapoetry for English-speaking audiences from all around the world, and probably also for those who do not understand the language well enough to read poetry that contains difficult metaphors and complex patterns.
Advertising – Descriptions
As was previously mentioned, six out of ten poet-users use their biographies to lead the user to their websites, where they sell poetry bundles or other merchandise. This shows how poet-users use their Instagram accounts as a means to directly advertise their books. Even though some more than others, all of the poet-users have published one or multiple poetry bundles.
Rupi Kaur seems to share poems from her poetry bundles and includes the names of those bundles in the description of her posts. In this way, the reader can easily look up the book they are interested in online. Tyler Knott Gregson includes a clickable link in his images (see: the “Winkel bezoeken” [visit store] bar on the bottom of each image) that leads the user to his webstore. When he uploads a ‘Typewriter Series’ post he seems to talk often (four out of five times) about the possibility of buying the poem on his website. Atticus only mentions his bundle's name in the description of one post, without a link. Lang Leav does the same as Atticus but does mention the bundles more often: in five out of ten posts.
Robert M. Drake only has two different descriptions he uses for the ten posts. The four oldest posts have the description: “Almost sold out! Claim one of the final hardcover copies of “She” (less than 400 copies left) – a book focused on self-growth. Follow the link in our bio to secure your pre-order. Thanks for your support and sending lots of love your way!”. In the other six posts, he changed his description to: “We’re down to our last batch of the hardcover edition of “She”, with less than 400 copies remaining. This book is dedicated to the journey of self-growth. To pre-order your copy, visit the link in our bio. We appreciate your support and send you all our love!”. Drake, then, uses Instagram to sell more books by advertising a poem to the users.
Yrsa Daley-Ward advertises in one out of the ten posts for her own Substack website: YrsaDaleyWard.Substack.com. The website’s visitor will first get a request to subscribe to the newsletter for free. After clicking the link, the visitor is sent to Daley-Ward’s website, where next to the possibility to buy books, visitors can also view her collaborations with big brands such as Burberry, Gucci, and Nike, or read about Daley-Ward’s personal history.
Brian Bilston seems to not use Instagram as an advertising platform. In the description of each of the ten posts, he tells something about the poem itself. However, in the description of non-poetry posts, he does talk about upcoming events or books. This means Bilston does advertise underneath his posts, but not underneath posts that contain Instapoetry.
Nikita Gill also does not use Instagram as an advertising platform. In none of the ten posts does Gill mention a poetry bundle or a website. As before mentioned, Gill does advertise in her biography. Like Bilston and Gill, Morgan Harper Nichols also does not advertise in her Instapoetry. Because she often posts videos accompanied by a “spoken word” style of poetry, Nichols mostly puts the poetry text in the posts’ descriptions, probably to allow users to easily read along or quickly re-read the poem.
Discussion
The analysis of the seven different elements seems to demonstrate that the affordances of Instagram mostly affect Instapoetry in length, recognizability, universality, and simplicity. Poet-users shape Instapoetry in such a way as to make it accessible for people who have at least some understanding of English from all over the world. Universal themes—which can nevertheless be complex, and reflect current societal issues—such as identity and love, are especially of importance for today’s digital natives. The use of universal graphics and colours that reflect nature also points to the universality of this poetry genre.
Hence, the poetry published on Instagram is shaped in such a way that it reflects the universality of the platform. Even though the focus on the English language could be interpreted as reflecting the traditional focus of the literary world on English literature from the West, English is a lingua franca. Combined with the simplicity of the poetry, Instapoetry is more accessible than other literary genres.
Overall, the study has displayed that poet users often choose usernames close to their real names, which decreases their findability. The poet-users’ biographies are mostly used for ads, personal achievements or short personal messages. The graphics used differ from no graphics at all to colourful displays of art. This also counts for the use of colour; some keep it simple and only use black-and-white colour schemes, while other poet-users upload colourful posts. Even though some poets use more colours than others, the overall feed always seems to be well thought out. Remarkable is that most graphics and colours are inspired by nature. For typography, it has been made visible that typed texts are preferred over hand-written text, and especially the Times New Roman font is popular for writing Instapoetry. Because of this, the poet-users are displaying a truly digital focus.
The study clearly shows that the low-level affordances limit the poet-user to a predetermined set of characteristics, but also challenge them to creatively express their poetry on Instagram.
The possibilities and constraints of technological affordances, as described by Hutchby, have become visible in this study (Bucher and Helmond, 2018). Many commonalities were discovered and the imagined affordances were, because of this, also made apparent. Hence, even if Instagram does not seem to be the most straightforward platform to use for people who want to become successful poets, by smartly employing Instagram’s affordances, the platform seems to offer the poets a community and successes that exceed the platform’s square borders and image-oriented character.
References
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